Google Photos not loading

This seems like a common topic on the forum – caching doesn’t work for Google Photos.

This is what happens when you are fetching albums for any provider:

1. Photonic makes a web-service call to the provider and gets the response
2. It builds the markup corresponding to the response it gets and prints it onto your post
3. The browser displays the markup

A caching plugin eliminates step 1 and saves the markup from step 2 internally, which is then used by step 3.

Here is where Google Photos differs from other providers: each time step 1 is executed, Google Photos returns a response that is only valid for 30 minutes. When the markup is generated in step 2 and the browser shows it, the links in the markup are actually “redirects”, which eventually lead to the links for the photos. There is no way to get to the links for the photos without the redirect. So if your markup is cached, it will cease to be valid after 30 minutes. This is not a Photonic issue, but it is rather a limitation with Google Photos.

That is why you will never be able to make the pages with Google Photos work with caching plugins. You might ask as to why the “Load More” works – that is because the links for the new photos are not cached.

If you are planning to use Google Photos and a caching plugin, you will need to exclude those pages with the photos from your caching plugin.

Marking this “Resolved” as the issue seems to be gone at the linked site. Please feel free to reopen if that is not the case.